Consumers are spending a significant amount of time listening to AM/FM radio stations during the course of the day, including when traveling in the automobiles. Consumers are also demanding entertainment from various other sources such as satellite radio, internet streaming radio, MP3 players, CD Player, etc. Content, whether in live broadcast, satellite, or other internet-based streaming, must be served to the consumer seamlessly and be made available on demand. This requires a dramatic increase in feeds in number of tuners and demodulators to provide all these services.
Traditional analog tuner architectures do not effectively scale to support receiving multiple radio stations simultaneously. For example, to support the simultaneous access to two radio stations, a system must include two analog tuners and four demodulators. Since analog tuners consume the largest amount power in the RF front end, the overall system power increases and the footprint for four RF tuners account for considerable board size and increased costs. Further, changes in the modulation format such as the relatively recent inclusion of HD radio in the FM band forces customers to replace the radios to receive the content in the new spectrum.
Further, AM/FM radio stations have great difficulty in accurately measuring the reach (e.g., the number of audience) who are listening to their audio programs. Traditionally, AM/FM radio stations have relied on surveys of a sample population of radio listeners, conducted by third parties such as Nielsen Media, to determine the possible reach of their audio programs. However, such surveys can be misleading due to how the sample population of radio listeners were chosen for the survey, how the sampled population understands terms such as “listening” when responding to queries of the survey, etc.
Among teaching a variety of other things, certain aspects of the inventions herein have embodiments which may satisfy one or more of the above-described issues.